I’m sure that if you have had weight problems in your life,
you have tried many things. Some of them
actually worked but required you to totally alter your life, undertaking
extreme measures of dieting, food restriction, counting, and other activities
that kept you focused on the task at hand.
And when you got to a point where you reached your goal, or could no
longer go on, you stopped. And what
happened? You may have held your weight for a time, but your old habits and
programming ultimately took over and you began to gain again.

I recently had a client who had tried everything. She had even tried to sign up for surgery and
found out that the medical conditions that she had would prevent her from
having a successful outcome. When she
came to see me, she was incredibly committed to losing weight, and the gastric
band was just what she wanted. She was
convinced it would work for her.

As I do with every client, I explain that the band is not a
magic bullet. Once it is installed, it
must be tweaked, upgraded and tuned so that it works and continues to
work.

One of the aspects of the band is
that if you decide you are going to throw all your resolve out the window, the
band will begin to fail. After all, it
is a device controlled by your subconscious, and if you are into undermining
yourself, the band can play no role in that. Yes, yes, she understood all of
this and wanted it. In doing her diet
history and learning something about her life, many of her diets and other
relationships seemed to run in 2-3 month cycles. We talked about this because it appeared to
me that she had some sort of block to having long term success.

She did extremely well with the band over the course of
several months, but one day contacted me to cancel her appointment because
nothing was working the way that it had.
I reminded her that what we were doing with the band required her
continued commitment for it to work for her and reminded her to listen to the
post-surgery CD that I provide for reinforcement. Over the next several weeks she would almost
make appointments, but something was always
in the way, and finally she stopped communicating with me. As I looked at the amount of time, the band
worked for her for almost exactly six weeks.

So what does this tell me?
Each of us has stories we tell ourselves that are self limiting. For whatever reason – generally stemming from
some time in early childhood – we develop these stories as means to explain the
world to ourselves. If you think about
the world as a baby, you don’t have a lot of information to work with – you don’t
know much, or have an ability to communicate well, or have physical abilities
that allow you to test the stories that you are creating. And because many of these form before we are
able to speak, they reside in us as feelings rather than as overt stories, but
this gives them no less power over our behavior.

So if you are a baby who decided that things you loved or
wanted were removed from you at six weeks, you may have created a story for
yourself that this was going to happen so you would never be committed to
something or someone for longer than six weeks. It sounds bizarre when you put
it in words, but it is very common to make these kinds of commitments to
ourselves so that we can avoid pain and loss.

And here you are 40+ years later, unable to sustain diets,
relationships, and blaming whatever or whoever for this lack in your life. Once
you are able to identify that this story is active in your life, then you can
begin to remove its energy. And all this
requires the willingness to accept responsibility for what is going on in your
life rather than pushing responsibility away onto others. In every story, there
is more than one side, and if it is your life, then you have a side. And if
decide to work in therapy on your weight, then not only will you need to be
honest with yourself about your food and eating and exercise, you will also
need to be willing to accept responsibility for other aspects of your life. And this is where therapy for weight loss
tends to break down. As long as the
client is focused on the problem and is doing limited problem-based work,
things progress. When challenges arise –
less weight loss than expected, feelings, other life issues that are being
triggered by healthy living – then the tendency is to retreat and blame.

The therapist is not the cause of the challenges, successes
or failures. Virtual surgery and any supportive hypnotherapy will work for you
if you are committed to making change in your life and working through
challenges as they arise. And some days the best you can do is show up and
acknowledge that things could be better and use your opportunity and your
therapist to help you find new directions and solutions.

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